Some ten years in the making, my account finally achieves another hard-won milestone as its watcher count finally reaches the realm of four digits. And my highest-profile character Tina is there to celebrate the occasion with a splash....of sloppy mud--no doubt making a complete mess of that cheerleader outfit she's wearing. Some of you may think that's quite okay, given the reputation that cheerleaders sometimes have, and others will no doubt find it exciting to see something pristine become corrupted (Internet Rule 15 or 43, depending on which list you're looking at).

Now that's not saying a whole lot in terms of visibility--ten years of FA's existence means most +watches in the recent past are part of large collections and unless you happen to already be a high-profile artist with homepage hitcounts in the 80,000 to 100,000 range the number that are actively +faving and/or commenting on one's work is typically a tiny fraction of that.

Technical:
Originally this was a commemorative of the 30,000th pageview on my gallery page. Needless to say, I missed that one by a wide margin while at the pencil stage. I was wondering what else could I use this for when I noticed that my watcher count was in the 990's. As it edged closer to the '1000' boundary, I switched priorities and set out to complete this pic as close to the thousandth +watch as possible, re-drawing the "30,000" in the splash to a "1000" before embarking on the color job. As it turns out, I missed the mark a couple of times--the actual count went above then dropped below 1000 a couple of times as I worked on this, so I concluded that it was better that the actual commemorative not appear till my watcher count stabilized at or above 1000.

Given the complexity of the crown of muddy water exploding out from her point of impact, I embarked on a "color over pencil" tactic often employed by digital artists doing streaming speed-paint sessions...minus the speed with which said artists usually accomplish such works. I didn't quite nail it well enough to leave out all of the line-art (I'm not so hot with color still), but it comes closer to the soft-shaded line-less look than any of of my past attempts. One of he last modifications I made was to change the position of her eyes--originally they were pointed straight ahead, but that tended to make her look like she was in a trance, so given the nature of the occasion, I pointed them toward the viewer just before finalizing the pic.

For those wanting to know how her outfit fared following the splash, I have already penciled completed an "after" pic. But that's still a few slots behind the next pic to be processed for posting.And you can see it here.

Pencil on bristol, digitally painted using Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Seven layers not including attribution text, about 200MB uncompressed.